Old Goriot (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

BALZAC, Honoré de (trans. Ellen Marriage; intro. François Mauriac; illus. René Ben Sussan). Old Goriot. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1993.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xv, 317 pp. Illustrations by René Ben Sussan throughout. "Notes from the Archives" pamphlet laid in. Collector's Library of Famous Editions. Originally published in serial form in La Revue de Paris, December 1834–February 1835; first book edition Paris: Werdet, 1835.

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) published Père Goriot — known in English by Ellen Marriage's translation title Old Goriot — at the end of 1834 and immediately recognised it as the work in which his larger project had found its method. It was the first of his novels to reintroduce characters from earlier books in substantial roles, and this device — the retour des personnages — became the structural principle of La Comédie humaine, the vast, interconnected cycle of nearly one hundred novels and stories in which Balzac attempted to document the whole of French society under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. At his death in 1850 the cycle was incomplete; what exists nonetheless constitutes one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of prose fiction.

Père Goriot is set in Paris in 1819, in the Maison Vauquer — a dilapidated pension in the Latin Quarter whose inhabitants include Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious young law student from Angoulême; Jean-Joachim Goriot, an elderly former vermicelli manufacturer occupying the cheapest room in the house; and Vautrin, a mysterious middle-aged man whose knowledge of the world and of its criminal underside is both total and entirely practical. The novel traces Rastignac's education in the realities of Parisian society — a society organised, Balzac insists, entirely around money and the social position it purchases — through his relationships with both Goriot, whose devotion to his two ungrateful daughters has reduced him to penury, and Vautrin, who offers a more direct route to wealth and invites Rastignac to consider whether his own ambitions are, at root, any more moral than the means Vautrin proposes.

The introduction is by François Mauriac (1885–1970), the French Catholic novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, whose own fiction shares with Balzac's a preoccupation with the corrupting power of money within families. The translation is by Ellen Marriage (1866–1944), whose English versions of Balzac remain the most widely reprinted in the language. The illustrations by René Ben Sussan were originally produced for the Heritage Press edition of the 1940s and are among the most distinguished visual interpretations of the novel.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000603